Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Creative Destruction

Heritage Industries

Creative Destruction

Truth

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

When truth
in science is acknowledged, Allan Savory suggests we won’t have enough cattle
to manage our grasslands.

If that is
a premise this morning, our world must change before we commence large scale
turf health restoration. The political culture today does not allow truths to
be told much less heralded. Our leadership celebrates power over truth. We
witness it everywhere, but, when power displaces truth as the rule, the first
law of logic is abandoned.

Aristotle
reminded us of that. He warned against it.

He
counseled that morality, truth, and reason must prevail. Each is part of
identifying characteristics of destroyers of our customs, our culture, and our
way of life. We must identify those destroyers before we lose the cornerstone
of reason to guide us. False truths that blemish or misidentify our way of life
are deadly to our existence.

As
ranchers, the object of our lives, our cows and their relationship to
grasslands, is not only misunderstood, it is being branded as immoral. The
abundant rhetoric being used to cast dispersions against this relationship are
inversely proportional to the wisdom it contains. We need a transformation of thinking.

Our country needs a renewed hunger
for Truth.

Dawn

The sound of saddling in the
predawn is timeless.

Most of the time there is little
conversation. Rather, each cowboy is concentrating on his task at hand. There
is always tension and it applies equally to cowboy and horse. There is pressure
of uncertainty and the interplay of the participants. There is pressure of
performance and it is heightened by the reality of raw circumstances. There is
no formal policy that applies to man and animal. The horse relies on
communication that isn’t written.

Thursday was the final day of a late
spring work marathon that started on the 6th of June. Every cowboy
felt the grind. I was tired and the crew was equally or more so. For the first
time, I didn’t engage with the crew in the extreme physical demands in the
branding pen. In the early days, I rode in the gather. In the latter, I only
branded.

Every morning started at 4:00 AM. It involved trucks and
trailers, miles before sunup, and all the risks inherent in this way of life.
Several days hit 104° and only one rain event delayed the process. Overall, it
was a perspective of mixed reactions. There were emotional and physical
catastrophes.

On Saturday, July 2, Congressman
Steve Pearce visited. His visit was part of a pre- Independence Day tour
emphasizing the risk of further reduction of heritage industries to New Mexico. Days before
he had been in the Lincoln
National Forest
advocating compromise in the case of withdrawal of sources of water to ranchers
impacted by the jumping mouse. He called attention to parallel impacts to the
lumber business of the area and how it had been eliminated as a source of local
and regional jobs. In fact, the logging industry is decimated in this state.

The mining industry is similar. It
is static or declining and political efforts to further reduce it are powerful.
Only existing, large scale mining remains somewhat robust. Small mining
operations, which once numbered in the hundreds, now number less than ten in
the entire state and the expertise that once accelerated their expansion and
relative advantages to the whole are gone.

Farming and ranching are under
similar regulatory and political maneuvering. One example is the recruitment of
young farmers and ranchers in Dona
Ana County.
There is only a 17% recruitment rate among current operations and barriers to
entry are forever tightening. The loss of critical mass in the segment poses
the growing likelihood of what the wildlife biologists describe as “accidental
losses” whereby any reduction of numbers poses the likelihood of structural
collapse.

As Congressman Pearce branded a
calf, the emotional impact of watching the cowboys observe him was not missed.
When it gets right down to it, it is the foundational spirit of America that is
at stake with the issues that affect this industry. It is manifested in many
ways, but it starts with human beings that are not expecting anything from
anybody, but, rather, they simply ask for nothing more or less than a chance to make their own way.

Creative Destruction

When heritage industry segments
decline, towns die, more workers are laid off, and the local tax base shrinks
yet more. In the case of that group of cowboys, the symptoms are far from
subtle. As they sat horseback or took their turn on the ground, they came from
six counties and two states. Their skill levels ranged from beginner through
journeyman with only a few near a threshold of what could be termed, Master.

Their fate, however, is not
controlled by their ability but by a legion of suited scribblers who have
bought into a utopian belief that government and special interests are more
important than local empowerment. They not only pay their own way, they are
subject to all the restrictions placed upon their heritage roots. They don’t
play on an expanding field of opportunities, but, rather, a finite field of
limited enterprises and regulatory mandates.

I believe that is the story
Congressman Pearce remains committed to resurrect. It is his attempt to uphold
truth as it applies to businesses that are, by their very nature, difficult to
survive. It has been made much worse by a governing system that has become an
exercise in creative destruction to its own productive members.

Saddling in the dark should be a
prerequisite for every suited scribbler. It would be yet more powerful if the
consequences of decisions inherent in such actions were tied to economic
results. Truth has a way of moderating actions if it is allowed to run its
course, but, as we all know too well … Truth doesn’t apply to Washington.

Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) coined the seemingly
paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists
have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), the Austrian economist wrote:

The opening up of new markets,
foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft
shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of
industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly
revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly
destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of
Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. (p. 83)

Although Schumpeter devoted a mere six-page chapter to “The Process of Creative Destruction,” in which he described capitalism as “the perennial gale of creative destruction,” it has become the centerpiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve.

The
saving grace comes from recognizing the good that comes from the
turmoil. Over time, societies that allow creative destruction to operate
grow more productive and richer; their citizens see the benefits of new
and better products, shorter work weeks, better jobs, and higher living
standards.

This constant churning in the market is the result of consumer choice and accrues to the benefit of all. The creative destruction by government, of which Wilmeth speaks, is of course just the opposite. The edicts issued by a few powerful bureaucrats benefits the few and results in fewer products of less quality and lower living standards. It is a permanent destruction.